Simply Simon

van Manen on writing

I do wonder from time to time why I am beset by a particular need to write. Perhaps van Manen offers some clues.

"Writing fixes thoughts on paper. It externalizes what in some sense is internal; it distances us from our immediate lived involvements with the things of the world. As we stare at the paper, and stare at what we have written, our objectified thinking now stares back at us."

“Writing is a kind of self-making or forming. To write is to measure the depth of things, as well as to come to a sense of one's own depth."

"Writing teaches us what we know, and in what way we know what we know. As we commit ourselves to paper we see ourselves mirrored in this text. Now the text confronts us."

"Writing gives appearance and body to our thought. … Writing constantly seeks to make external what is somehow internal. We come to know what we know in this dialectic process of constructing a text and thus learning what we are capable of saying."

"The narrative power of the story is that sometimes it can be more compelling, more moving, more physically and emotionally stirring than lived-life itself. Textual emotion, textual understanding can bring an otherwise sober-minded person (the reader but also the author) to tears and to a more deeply understood worldly engagement."

"One writes to make public, to make conversationally available what the author lives with: an idea, a notion being questioned."

"To write is to exercise self-consciousness."

"Writing, true writing, is authoring, the exercise of authority: the power that anchors and gives shape to our personal being."

_____________________
Max van Manen, Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy (New York: State University of New York Press, 1990).

Anne Lamott

On books:

" ... for some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us to understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. They are full of all the things you don't get in real life--wonderful, lyrical language, for instance, right off the bat. And quality of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention. An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift."

On writing:

"I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. The thing you had to force yourself to do--the actual act of writing--turns out to be the best part. It's like discovering that while you thought you needed to tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward."

" ... I try to help them understand that writing, and even getting good at it, and having books and stories and articles published, will not open the doors that most of them hope for. It will not make them well. It will not give them the feeling that the world has finally validated their parking tickets, that they have in fact finally arrived. My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested."

"But I also tell them that sometimes when my writer friends are working, they feel better and more alive than they do at any other time. And sometimes when they are writing well, they feel that they are living up to something. It is as if the right words, the true words, are already inside them, and they just want to help them get out."
_____________________
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1994).

God Next Door

Encouraging news from the publisher. The book God Next Door is due for release April 16. Here's what the blurb on the back cover says:

"What if God lived next door? Would it make any difference to your neighbourhood? More importantly, would it make a difference to your role as a neighbour? Jesus defined the essence of the Christian life as loving God with heart, soul, mind and strength and loving our neighbour as ourselves. God and neighbour are intimately linked and the call to loving our neighbours is high on the Christian agenda. So what does this mean for the way we live with the people next door?

Simon Carey Holt has listened to the experiences of numerous men and women of faith living in a variety of urban and suburban neighbourhoods. By drawing these experiences into conversation with biblical and cultural perspectives on residential life, he uncovers the spiritual possibilities of our neighbourhoods. The result is an inspiring new agenda for local mission in the 21st century."

A launch is scheduled for Thursday April 19, 5.30pm at the Geoffrey Blackburn Library, Whitley College (271 Royal Parade, Melbourne). You are most welcome! Copies will be available at the launch or can be ordered through Acorn Press or your local Christian bookstore.

A flying hippo!

Caution ... poet at work.

Poetry

Take a look at the poems of one of my favourite Australian poets here. Though his taste in footy teams is questionable, he has a wonderful way with words!

A Baptist and a Book

It’s been a while. Life is full.

Thanks to those who’ve asked about Baptists Today. Despite the unreasonable levels of anxiety, it all went well. My partner’s presentation was exceptional. My role of preparing the way for her brilliance was only reaffirmed. If you’re interested, you can access our lectures here.

Good news on the book front. The publisher has formally accepted my book for publication, due out early 2007. Now all I have to do is finish it! I’ve been given until the end of September to complete the manuscript. With two and a half chapters still to write it all seems a bit much. Finding time is a challenge. Still, I am thankful for a deadline.

For those who are interested, it has the working title God Next Door: Spirituality and Mission in the Neighbourhood. I know ... the publisher doesn't much like it either. In part, the proposal reads as follows:

In the Gospels, Jesus describes the essence of spirituality as loving God with heart, soul, mind and strength, and loving our neighbour as ourselves. Do these two things, Jesus says, and you’ve got it down! The questions that undergird this book are these: What does it mean to love and seek God where I live? And what does the command to love our neighbours as we love ourselves have to do with the people who live next door? How do the realities of contemporary urban and suburban life impact upon our experience of faith and community?

With these questions in mind, this book will draw upon the insights of sociology, community psychology, biblical studies and theology as they bear upon the contemporary experience of neighbours and urban dwellers. Further, it will propose ways of intentionally embracing the neighbourhood as a context for Christian living and mission.

Essentially, this is a book for ordinary Christians living ordinary lives in the most routine and daily places of life. It is a book that calls us to take seriously what’s right in front of our noses. It’s not about complex strategies for mission, theories of urbanism, or theologies of community. While these undergird it, it is more simply a reminder that in our pursuit of the presence and call of God, we cannot forget to look out on the street where we live; and a practical encouragement to rediscover the neighbourhood as an important place of community and faith.

Book meme

Jobloggs tagged me a few weeks back to respond to the ‘one-book meme’ that’s doing the rounds. It’s the first question that threw me: the one book that changed my life? Good grief! And then there’s all the others, each one as intimidating as the last. But then Mark began his list, “Here’s how I would answer this week …” Ok, so I can do that.

1. One book that changed your life:

None really, but if I was pushed, as an impressionable fifteen year old I read Norman Grubb’s biography CT Studd: Cricketer and Pioneer. It would be true to say it turned my understanding of faith on its head. Today there is much about that book and those like it that I want to bury in a box marked ‘spiritual dysfunction’, but each stage of faith has its own legitimacy. So I can still value what the book meant for me at the time.

More recently, Julia Cameron’s The Right to Write was a liberating call to vocation.

2. One book you’ve read more than once:

The Gospel of Luke

3. One book you’d want on a desert island:

A family photo album

4. One book that made you laugh:

Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird

5. One book that made you cry:

Jonathan McCarthy’s Journey Through Darkness (actually I can’t recall the author’s exact name … something like that)

6. One book you wish had been written:

It’s OK by any person I esteemed when I was a teenager

7. One book you wish had never been written:

T.C. Hammond’s In Understanding Be Men, for personal reasons at the time rather than theological, though those personal reactions have since found some theological legitimacy.

8. One book you’re currently reading:

Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking

9. One book you’ve been meaning to read:

Jacques Pépin’s The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen

10. Tag five people:

Oh, um … I’ll let you self-select

Poetry

My friend Paul Mitchell is a Melbourne-based poet/writer. And one of my favourite performance poets. As part of the upcoming Overload Poetry Festival, Paul has a host of readings and events through July and August. This is his site. If you are in Melbourne, click on Upcoming Gigs and check him out. He's worth it!

Autumn

Autumn is far and away my season of choice. The luminous colours, the light, the crisp, cold air on my face and—at least once during the day—the sun gently warming my back. It’s magic. Especially here in Parkville. I feel the privilege of Royal Parade almost every morning as my tram rattles along under the canopy of Elms that stretches out into the morning mist.

As I travelled this morning, I read Marion Halligan’s description of the Canberra autumn of 2003. Her words are as descriptively beautiful as the season itself. Well, almost ...

The autumn seems to get longer and longer. This one is particularly gorgeous, slow and still. Whatever the drought has done, this must be its gift. I always think of Canberra autumns as painted, because they are usually windless ... But this year is somehow tremulous. As though the drought has terrified the trees with threats of their own mortality, and this is a brave face they’re putting on. The brightest trees have lost only some of their leaves, and those that are left are particularly luminous, the light shines through them with this glowing trembling quality. And then sometimes the light is quite sharp, it’s as though the trees are hung with mirrors, in among their coloured leaves, and they all slowly shift and glitter in a marvellous display of dying.

(The Taste of Memory, Allen & Unwin, 2004, p 81)

Guilty!

This past month, I’ve read two books on writing.

One by Anne Lamott, author of Travelling Mercies—perhaps the best and most down to earth spiritual memoir I’ve come across. This one, though, is titled Bird by Bird: Some Instruction on Writing and Life. The second is by the noted author, playwright and poet Joy Carol Oates, The Faith of the Writer: Life, Craft, Art. Both books are inspiring and, of course, beautifully written. But in the midst of the encouragement and inspiration, both authors throw some unexpected punches. I’m winded and guilty!

Oates puts it this way: "The strain of trying always to write beautifully, with originality, with 'exultant' force can be self damning, paralyzing. There is both vanity and humility in the despair of the perfectionist."

Lamott simply kicks me while I’m down: "Perfectionism will ruin your writing, blocking inventiveness and playfulness ... Perfectionism means that you try desperately not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived. Clutter is wonderfully fertile ground--you can still discover new treasures under all those piles, clean things up, edit things out, fix things, get a grip. Tidiness suggests that something is as good as it’s going to get. Tidiness makes me think of held breath, or suspended animation, while writing needs to breath and move."

Spurred on by these barbs and taking a deep breath, I’m hesitant to report that I’ve finally sent off Part One of my manuscript to a publisher. It’s not perfect. In fact, when I read it through I cringe. And then I wonder who in the world I think I am. And then I madly revise and rewrite and clean up some more.

Still, I pushed the button. It’s gone. And now there’s just Parts Two and Three to finish. Oh dear.